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I wonder how many hypervisors the IT industry needs?

by Charlie Bess

Jonathan Schwartz’s blog states the MS and Sun are moving closer together and supporting each other’s efforts. Microsoft has stated that the beta of theirs (Viridian) will be available when Server 2008 is released to manufacturing, and that it will support Xen, VMWare and others. See a video here.

VMWare ESX 3i is now out and it appears to be smaller (32MB), backward compatible and simpler to use.

With Citrix purchase of Xen Source, it just seems like before long there will need to be some market consolidation. Other bloggers think there is lots of headroom. From a hardware perspective, last year was definitely the year of multi-core and this year seems to be the year of virtualization, makes me wonder what’s next.

Published Thursday, September 20, 2007 3:36 PM

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Comments

Posted by Marin Tellur Friday, September 21, 2007 11:57 PM

I just paid my VMWare bill, and let me just say I would dearly love for them to have some competition. The price is outrageous. I hope Sun and Microsoft are successful.

Posted by Mark Wednesday, October 03, 2007 8:36 PM

Realistically, there really are only two x86 hypervisors. VMware, and Xen. Xensource (now Citrix) and Virtual Iron are both Xen. Microsoft Viridian is essentially Xen underneath. Sun's xVM is Xen. And both Red Hat and Novell include Xen in their Linux distributions.

Clearly, there is a concern of incompatibility within the Xen market. And OS vendors such as Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell, and Sun, have different motivations from hypervisor pure-play companies like Citrix and Virtual Iron.

Posted by Marc L Friday, November 30, 2007 11:50 AM

Sun are not legally allowed to use the statement "Sun's xVM is Xen". What they have to say is "xVM Server will include code derived fron the XEN community"